Two Kenyan students have invented a device that allows bicycle riders to charge their phones as they pedal.
Deemed a “dynamo-powered smart charger”, the device should make it more economical for the 17.5 million Kenyans who use mobile phones to charge them. Even more impressive, the environmentally-friendly phone charger was originally built from scraps retrieved from a junkyard.

Currently most Kenyans who live in rural areas don’t have electricity, and people often have to travel great distances to find shops that offer to charge phones with car batteries or solar panels. And that can come at a stiff cost– around the equivalent of $2 per charge, enough to thin your wallet if you’re a rural Kenyan.

That’s where Jeremiah Murimi, 24, and Pascal Katana, 22, come in. Both electrical engineering students at Nairobi University, the two students who invented the device come from small villages and so understand the problem. Strapped themselves, the resourceful students had to turn trash into treasure in order to build the prototype for their device– literally. “We took most of [the] items from a junk yard - using bits from spoilt radios and spoilt televisions,” said Mr Katana.

In Kenya, bicycles are already sold with a dynamo to be attached to the back wheel to power the lights, so part of how the device works is already built into the design of the bikes. That dynamo lead can then be switched to plug into the charger instead. It takes about an hour of pedaling to fully charge a phone.

Even better, the device is so small that it can fit in your pocket while you ride for easy storage. And it’s cheap. The two students are looking to sell their product for just around the equivalent of $4.50– chump change compared to the costs of having to charge phones by other means.

Kenya’s National Council for Science and Technology has backed the project, and the students hope they will find a way of mass-producing the chargers. But Murimi and Katana aren’t letting their ingenuity go to their heads. “We are not planning to stop our studies,” Mr Murimi said.

Source: GO Media -Written by Bryan Nelson - Image Credit: quest for the heartstone on Flickr under a CC License

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